UWC2101B: Writing & Critical Thinking: Questions of Taste

Topical Introduction

Unlike some other sensations, taste is particularly mutable, adamantly subjective, and sometimes in conflict with our own aesthetic ideas. In this course, we will seek to understand the meanings and manifestations of taste. More than a sensory pleasure, taste is philosophy, ideology, an aesthetic that most social creatures acknowledge, and often desire. We will explore the ways that taste works in various historical contexts, social settings, and physical locations. Through a diverse set of readings, we will examine how taste is produced, perceived, categorized, and exploited. Our consideration of taste will range from representations of gastric pleasures and displeasures to figures of taste, both good and bad--the fop, the lady, and the dandy, for example. Our explorations will include considerations of good taste, bad taste, tastelessness, kitsch, camp, and various other distinctions.

Critical Thinking Objectives

This course will allow you to improve your reading, writing, and critical thinking skills. We will engage in close readings of a wide range of material from different times, disciplines, and literary genres. While some of the material will be new to you, other pop culture texts may be familiar to you. This familiarity will present interesting challenges in reading these texts critically, since such comfort can make it difficult to see beyond the "obvious," or to question what we feel we already know. As we engage in reading, writing, and discussion, we will delineate key terms, understand a given author's rhetorical strategies, question the assumptions of a given strategy, and offer up our own questions about a given issue. You will write several short, informal pieces of writing as well as three formal essays. These different writing exercises will help you move through the processes of generating ideas, revising, and producing a final draft. We will also learn methods of writing with sources and conducting research in the library.

Unit 1: Taste Histories

In eighteenth-century debates on the value of art, "taste" was a crucial yet contested term. The British statesman, parliamentary orator and political thinker Edmund Burke, for example, argued that taste was a refined and sophisticated feeling achieved by surrounding oneself with high art. Others argued that taste was an understanding acquired by rational study and contemplation. In the midst of these intellectual questions, debates about popular tastes like fashion raged at street level. In this unit, we will we will explore historical considerations of taste as they have evolved. We will consider ways in which eighteenth-century writers delineated ideas about fashion as distinct from notions of art. We will consider ways in which literature represents the classy and the declasse, the poseur, the connoisseur, the lady, and the snob. We will explore ways in which degrees of taste coincide with markers of social class, nationality, sexuality, and gender.

Rhetorical Objectives

• how to use the Oxford English Dictionary
• how to use key terms and definitions
• how to develop interesting and complex analytical questions
• how to evaluate a thesis and how to develop a good one
• how to organize ideas into a developing argument
• how to do a "close reading" of a text
• how to approach a different types of writing

Sample Readings

1. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, (London: Fontana P, 1983), 313-315.
2. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, "The Pleasures of the Imagination," No. 409 [19 June, 1712] ed. Angus Ross (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 364-406.
3. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 [1818]), Ed. Marilyn Butler, 236 pages.
4. Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, "On the Senses," "On Taste," "On Gastronomy," "On Gourmandism," in The Physiology of Taste [1825], trans. M.F.K. Fisher, (Washington, DC: Counterpoint P, 1999 [1949]), 34-56; 147-156
5. Edmund Burke, "On Taste," in A Philosophical Enquiry, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990 [1757], 1-26
6. Sir George Etherege, Man of Mode, (New York: Norton, 1979 [1676], 79-151)
7. David Hume, "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion," (1741)"Of the Standard of Taste" (1757)in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary vol. 2, Eds. T.H. Green and T.H. Grose (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875).
8. William Thackeray, Book of Snobs (London: Oxford UP, n.d.)
9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment in Contemporary Philosophy of Art: Readings in Analytic Aesthetics[1790], Eds. John W. Bender and H. Gene Blocker (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993) 179-191.

Unit 2: Consuming Tastes

Just as eighteenth-century thinkers asked if taste may be "acquired," we will extend the question to ask if taste can be bought or sold. Moving from Jane Austen's world of crinoline, hats, and horses, we move to more contemporary consumer needs and desires. This unit will explore the relationship of consumerism and taste in more contemporary (and local) contexts. We will consider the ways in which taste is expressed in the shopping meccas of Hong Kong, New York, and Singapore. We will further interrogate the aesthetic possibilities of consumer culture through subcultural expression, excess, and other forms of difference. We will seek to understand the interconnections of taste, status, and spending. Moreover, we will reexamine aesthetic valuations with a look at other expressions of taste: kitsch, camp, bad taste, tastelessnesss, both intentional and unintentional. We will explore these concepts through the lens of populist and popular U.S. culture, as one example, found in the self-conscious and ironic embrace of the tacky, the sordid, the ersatz. Moreover, we will explore writings that represent good taste gone bad, whether as a result of addiction, personal excess, or "perversion."

Rhetorical Objectives

• how to use specific examples to support a claim
• how to achieve coherence and cohesion in a text
• how to use clear language to express ideas
• how to develop connections between texts that use different key concepts, organizational principles, and criteria of meaningfulness

Sample Readings

1. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984 [1979], 1-30.
2. Dick Hebdige, "Subculture: The Meaning of Style" in The Subcultures Reader, Eds. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (New York: Routledge, 1997), 130-142.
3. Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp" in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, Ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999), 53-65.
4. Annie Hau-Nung Chan, "Middle-class Formation and Consumption in Hong Kong" in Consumption in Asia: Lifestyle and Identities , Ed. Chua Beng-Huat (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 98-134.
5. Chua Beng-Huat, "Singaporeans Ingesting McDonald's"in Consumption in Asia: Lifestyle and Identities , Ed. Chua Beng-Huat (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 183-201.
6. Jane & Michael Stern, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).
7. John Seabrook, "Nobrow Culture," New Yorker, Sept. 20, 1999: 104-111.

Unit 3: Taste Tests

In this unit, we will track the achievements of figures and works which attempt and often succeed in molding the tastes of a generation, a culture, or a nation. We will explore the ways in which society at large marks the tastes of others and the ways in which figures emerge as tastemakers and arbiters of taste.

Rhetorical Objectives

• how to evaluate sources
• how to work sources into your essay without plagiarizing
• how to summarize an argument and how to evaluate a summary
• how to format references and bibliography
• how to generate theoretical claims by situating your ideas in relation to the ideas of others

Sample Readings

1. Roland Barthes, Mythologies,(New York: Hill & Wang, 1987 [1957], 58-64).
2. M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating, (New York: Macmillan, 1990), selections TBA
3. Octavio Paz, "Hygiene and Repression," in Ourselves Among Others, Ed. Carol J. Verburg, (New York: St. Martin's P, 1988)
4. "Kwest for Kawaii," Time June 25, 2001: 46-48.
5. Michael Specter, "High-heel Heaven: Manolo Blahnik's World of Shoes," New Yorker, March 20, 1999: 102-110.
6. Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol's Philosophy of Life, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975), 61-72.
7. Selected art, Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman